[p2p-research] what to think of the market

Ryan Lanham rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 29 17:59:33 CEST 2009


A friend of mine just returned from a tour of Iceland.  She found it
extremely commons-oriented--shared grazing rights...lots of community assets
(heated geo-thermal pools for instance which even small towns have)...lots
of fish in the diet from the sea, etc.

I think one set of discussions that is often played with here but never
really fleshed out is...which nations are most P2P and why?

Given her description, it sounds like Iceland is a candidate.  And yet no
country has had a worse outcome with messy speculative trading and losses
than Iceland in recent times.  So, maybe P2P isn't an ethos afterall.  Maybe
it is a vein of post-modernism--a piece but not a whole.

Ryan
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> In the end, I think the failed statist-socialist experiments where just
> another form of capital, exhibiting many of the same 'modernist' aspects of
> western capital systems, like enclosures of the commons, expropriation of
> worker's surplus value, growth by accumulation of capital, etc...
>
> Michel
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 2:44 AM, Kevin Carson <
> free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 7/28/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I was merely pionting out that people have been innovating in very
>> different
>> > social models, way before the capitalist market became dominant, and
>> often
>> > outside of market relations, think of patronage, gift economies, the
>> > invention of fire and the wheel etc..
>>
>> True, and even in planned economies like the USSR where it was almost
>> impossible to value the productive resources going into an innovation
>> and rank the alternative uses of those resource, at least some
>> use-value was being created.  Refrigerators, microwaves, improved
>> vehicles, televisions, etc., were introduced over the years of Soviet
>> rule, and the general standard of living was surely better as a result
>> of the technical progress.
>>
>> I've had some right-wing libertarians tell me the corporate economy
>> couldn't be as statist as I make it out to be, and that it must be
>> predominantly a market system even with the present degree of state
>> involvement, because otherwise calculational chaos would have rendered
>> it non-functional.
>>
>> In response I point to the innovations that took place in feudal
>> Europe and under Soviet rule, and argue that by their standards it
>> would require a degree of statism greater than that of the Soviet
>> Union or feudal Europe to result in economic collapse.  Then I
>> cheerfully concede that American state capitalism is probably no more
>> statist than the USSR.
>>
>> What we have, though, in both the US corporate economy and the old
>> USSR, is a lot of new technology and only the vaguest ideas of whether
>> it's something people actually wanted or just what the bureaucracy
>> wanted to design, and whether it is an efficient use of resources.
>>
>> --
>>  Kevin Carson
>> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
>> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
>> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
>> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
>> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
>> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
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